Building the garden - the fast way!

This weekend we rented a skid steer to finally get all the dirt for the garden beds moved.  It took about 4 hours of running the machine to move the 40ish cubic yards of dirt that make up the rest of the garden beds, but we did it!  While I ran the skid steer, Jeremy and the kids raked and shoveled the piles of dirt I dropped into reasonable beds.  Unfortunately, there's just no way they could keep up with the machine, so only about half the garden is in its final form.  Here are some pics to show you where it sits for now.

The end that got raked into beds along with the beds we already made

The end that hasn't been raked yet - there's some more work to do here.

 

Sunday, we went to Baldwin to help Scott move some stuff and to dig up his asparagus bed (he didn't want the plants).  I dug asparagus while Jeremy helped him move.  We ended up with about a dozen plants for our efforts, some of which were very nice sized.

Digging asparagus in Baldwin

Later Sunday, we had 2 friends who are photographers come out to take family pictures outside at the farm with Scott and Elexys.  We enjoyed a couple of hours walking around and getting cool, informal pictures all over.  It was a nice reminder that the farm has some very beautiful and relaxing places...we should take more walks. 

Lisa Marie and Christian with Jeremy

 

After pictures, we planted the asparagus crowns and then went out for a fun dinner together.  It was a nice end to a busy day.

Planting asparagus in our picture clothes - who else does this stuff?

Keep it covered!

We weren't fast enough and we broke the rule.  The one cardinal rule of organic growing (other than don't use chemicals) is Keep the Soil Covered!  We had all the dirt work done last fall and the soil has been bare since.  We planted grass seed, but not in time to prevent some significant erosion from the recent rains.  This means that the swales we carefully built a few weeks ago are now full of topsoil.  They also ran over in several places creating washes down the hillside. 

The good news is that the swales did their job and kept most of the soil on the hillside.  The straw we spread around the garden also helped - the erosion was much less severe on those slopes.

You can now guess how the kids and I spent Saturday!  Yep, we moved a lot of straw.  The kids spread straw all along the hillside to cover the bare ground while I moved bales to create temporary retaining walls to prevent further runoff with the next rain.  I also fixed the places where our swales had been overrun.  The hillside now looks like this:

New bale swales and mulch on the hillside.

There's still more work to do to move the topsoil that washed down back up where it belongs, but this will hopefully hold it while the grass grows in.  There is a fair amount of green coming up under the straw and in some of the bare places, so we're crossing our fingers that it will  hurry up and grow!

Green grass sprouting..hurry up and grow!

On Sunday, Jeremy and I pruned the grapes at our house in town, started some more clippings, and removed the last parts of our old garden fence.  This puts us one step closer to having all the plants moved to the farm.  We still need to move the raspberries, grapes, more asparagus and a host of herbs before the spring gets much farther along.  Never a dull moment here!


Since we were making a trip to the farm to take the fence poles anyway, we also picked up some bagged leaves from our neighbor's to mulch the blackberries.  They now have a nice, thick layer of leaf mulch to help keep the moisture in the soil. 

mulched blackberries

Of bales, grass and fences

Sunday was another productive, although shorter, day at the farm.  Jacob and I managed to stack bales along the lowest of the swales behind the greenhouse.  They should form a good wall to catch any topsoil that tries to wash down the hill before the grass we planted comes in.  I have to say that after all the work we did on Saturday, we were moving pretty slow!  Catherine joined in by starting to spread hay on the area behind the greenhouse.  Have I mentioned how much I love my kids?

The bales and mulch behind the greenhouse.

When Jeremy arrived, he and I put in the 8' T-posts that complete the post part of the garden fence.  It's really starting to look fence-like now! 

Its starting to look like a fence...and Daisy got a photo op.  :D

 

While we did that, the kids continued spreading straw where we had planted grass.  The plan was for them to continue that while Jeremy and I strung wire for the fence.  Unfortunately, we realized that the fence staples were still at home.  So much for that idea!  So instead, we all spread straw out on the slopes around the garden spot.  We really don't want to leave this ground bare any longer than we have to because of the risk of erosion.  We're hoping that with the straw shading the soil and the moist week we're looking to have, the grass will go ahead and come up.  There are some small spots where we can already see some blades poking through and the clover in the garden is coming up in several places.  With a little luck (and rain), the area will look lush and green before the heat of summer kicks in.

The west slope around the garden covered in straw.

 

The rest of Sunday was spent resting and taking care of things at home (laundry still doesn't do itself, I'm sad to report).  A wonderful end to a wonderful weekend!

Asparagus and Blackberries

For some minor catch up, Jeremy spent time this week finishing off the poles for the garden fence.  He did some very nice chainsaw work to notch some neat arches over the future gates and he put in solid braces at all the corners and gate posts.  We'll be ready to string wire soon!

Today was another glorious spring day and we spent it moving our blackberries and some of the asparagus out to the farm.  The aparagus was quite the chore.  After digging for over 2 hours, I finally had to admit defeat.  Prying one of these 7 year old crowns out of the asparagus bed needed someone with more weight on the shovel!  The kids and I switched our attention to the blackberry canes growing in our front yard.  It only took a little while to dig them up.  Between those and the ones that we started from cuttings last year, we ended up with 23 plants!

Shortly after digging the blackberries, my brother came by.  He graciously offered to help pry the 2 asparagus crowns I'd been working on out of the ground and we had them in a tub for transplanting in a jiffy.  When Jeremy came home, we made short work of the other 2 crowns in that row.

Then we loaded all the asparagus starts in the greenhouse, the ones we'd dug up and all the blackberries up into the Ford to take to the farm.  It was a bed full of plants!  The asparagus went in first.  We alternated small starts from the greenhouse with the larger mature crowns.  In total, we had 16 asparagus plants. 

The mass of roots in the middle of the hole is one of the mature crowns being planted.

 

Planting asparagus - you can see the green fronds of the greenhouse grown asparagus in the foreground - they're about a month ahead of the others.

 

Next, we turned our attention to the blackberries.  These will be growing along the west fence around the garden to form a living screen from the road.  We started by loosening the soil in a line where the fence will be.  Next, we added a top dressing of topsoil from the soil mountain and last, we planted the blackberries.  The 23 plants will quadruple the number we had in town if they all survive.  I can't wait!

Jeremy breaking up the row while I planted blackberries.

 

 

Watering in the blackberries.  Check out the future gate!

 

There was lots of watering in to do with the 3 vegetable beds, the entire bed in front of the greenhouse and the blackberry row.  I suspect we will be spending quality time with the garden hose over the next several months.

On another positive note, it looks like all but 2 of our fruit trees survived the winter.  Several are already budding out!  I'm so excited to have those trees already planted and growing.  In another year or two, we'll have our own fruit!

Stay tuned - the warmer weather means much will be happening!

Potatoes and onions are in!

For those in Kansas, you know that we had one of the most beautiful spring weekends we’ve seen in quite a while this past weekend.  We celebrated by spending all day Sunday at the farm working on the garden.  First though, here is a picture of the swales we created a couple of weeks ago:

3 swales on contour

The kids and I (Jeremy was at work) started the day by marking out 3 new beds to build.  These are 4’x20’ garden beds.  Then we started hauling dirt up from the dirt mountain to create the raised bed.  Have I mentioned how in love I am with this soil?  It’s wonderful, black, crumbly stuff – a gardener’s dream.  In the picture below, you can see where we’ve started the first of the 3 beds.

3 beds laid out, dirt started for first one.  You can see the kids loading the next wheel barrow in the background.

We planted almost all of these plus 70 seed potatoes!

Naturally, the batteries in the camera died after this picture, so I don’t have pictures of the rest of what we did…

Once the first bed was created, we planted about 80 cabbage and broccoli plants and covered them with an insect barrier.  We’ve found that it’s the only way to keep the cabbage worms off of the plants so that we get a reasonable harvest.  We still have more cabbage and cauliflower to plant, but that will have to wait until we can get more insect barrier.

The second bed was planted with about 400 onions.  We still have leeks to plant, but otherwise all the onions are in for this year.  The third bed got 40 hills of potatoes with the remainder of our onions planted on the borders.  We have another 30 hills of potatoes planted in the bed in front of the hoop house.

With a little luck and some good weather, we’ll be back at the farm this week to work on the fence and build another bed to hold the rest of the cabbage/cauliflower and the leeks.  We need to get the fence up as soon as possible because we noticed deer tracks all over the fresh soil around the garden.  We also had our neighbor’s chickens and ducks with us for most of the day and prior experience says that when tasty little things start shooting up from the ground, they will get eaten.  Must get the fence done.  Quickly.  On the upside, there is very little in life that is more entertaining than watching chickens be chickens and the intermittent serenade of quacks from the ducks was nice.

Speaking of neighbors, when we got in the truck to go back home it wouldn’t start.  Didn’t even try to turn over.  Since the camera whose batteries died was my phone, we were basically stranded with no way to call anyone.  The only thing left to do was go next door and see if they could help.  Our truly amazing neighbor, Don Spradling, didn’t even hesitate.  He brought his truck over to try jumping ours and when that didn’t work, he started checking other things.  He discovered that we had a bad starter relay.  Luckily there are 3 identical relays in the box, so he switched it for another one and the truck started right up.  Thank God for good neighbors!  Needless to say, a new relay was purchased and installed this morning.  If Don hadn’t been there and known enough to check and swap the relays, we would have had to call a tow truck and pay a mechanic to find out that we needed a $15 relay.  We really can’t say thank you enough.